


When we've made many thousands

by scintilla10



Category: The Mummy Series
Genre: Adventures!, Community: rarewomen, F/M, Five Times, Libraries & Librarians, Magical Artifacts, POV Female Character, Post-First Movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-28
Updated: 2013-04-28
Packaged: 2017-12-09 19:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/776922
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scintilla10/pseuds/scintilla10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times a Carnahan made a decision that could, in retrospect, be considered a mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When we've made many thousands

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pristineungift](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pristineungift/gifts).



> When it comes to historical accuracy, this story is about as unrealistic as the movies.
> 
> Many thanks to somnolentblue for the excellent beta-ing. Much love, bb! ♥

i.

There were Egyptian artefacts in the camel's saddlebag.  

Evy blinked down at them in surprise, caught between feeling delighted and dumb-struck. They must be from Hamunaptra, but she was at a loss to account for how they'd ended up on Rick's camel.

Anyway, truth be told, she'd been hoping to find food. It had been a long day -- several long days, in point of fact. They were only a day's ride from Hamunaptra and Cairo wasn't even a glimmer on the horizon yet. And it did not look like there would be any dinner.

The light of the setting sun glinted off the gold near the top of the satchel, and, out of the corner of her eye, Evy saw Jonathan, with his hound's nose for treasure, swivel his head in her direction. The shocked expression on his face settled the question of whether Jonathan had anything to do with it.

Rick came to a halt next to Evy and let out a soft "Huh" of surprise. The three of them stood in silence for a few moments.

"I'll have to examine them more closely, of course," Evy said. "But they certainly appear genuine."

Rick hauled the saddlebags off the camel with what Evy felt was an impressive show of shoulder strength. 

"Looks like we're really not leaving empty-handed, after all," he said, giving Evy a quick, sly grin.

"Good God, but I love Egypt!" Jonathan exclaimed, and Evy couldn't help but beam at the two of them. They were hungry and bruised and exhausted, but they were alive and they were in the most wonderful country in the world.  

Later that night, Rick said, "So you've found your treasure, after all," with a thread of laughter in his voice. 

They'd taken refuge in the minimal shelter provided by the ruins of an old fort. Jonathan was sleeping by the low fire, his arms curled protectively around one of the saddlebags, so it was just the two of them awake under the vast starry sky.

Evy shook her head. "Oh, no! I'm a librarian, remember, not a treasure-hunter."

"Oh, I could never forget that," Rick said, and there was an unusual kind of sincerity in his voice that made Evy's pulse flutter.

"I haven't a clue what to tell the Bembridge Scholars about any of this," Evy blurted out to cover her sudden nervousness. "I mean, it's all rather fantastical, isn't it? And to make matters worse, all of my research notes have been completely destroyed! They account for years of research, you know. It will take -- well, some time to rewrite them."  

Rick flashed her a grin in the darkness. "Some time, huh?"

Evy shivered, feeling unaccountably warm. 

"Does that mean you intend to stay in Cairo for a while?" Rick continued, shifting closer to her.

"Oh, I --" Evy began, and the low pitch of his voice made the memory of the day's distracting kisses rise unbidden in her mind.

Jonathan chose that moment to let out a loud obnoxious snore. 

After a startled moment of silence, Evy burst into laughter, and Rick smiled back at her, relaxed and easy. 

She looked over at her brother again. "Anyway, these artefacts aren't treasure," she said. "They belong in a museum. Jonathan will come around to the idea."

"Will he," Rick said in a deadpan.

Evy shook her head and giggled. "I'll convince him," she said confidently. She had a sudden unsettling thought. "Deducting your cut, of course," she added earnestly. "We don't intend to cheat you, no matter what my brother's done to you in the past."

The light from the fire wasn't strong enough for her to make out Rick's expression. Perhaps it hadn't been wise to remind him of Jonathan's pick-pocketing. But she didn't want him to think she would allow her brother to keep the artefacts for himself, not after everything they'd been through together. And certainly not since she was quite sure that when it came to Rick O'Connell she was -- well, that she felt --

"Didn't even cross my mind," Rick said finally. He looked into the fire and didn't meet her gaze.

As she curled up by the glowing embers with Rick a respectable distance away from her, Evy had the feeling that she'd said something terribly wrong. The trouble with men, she reflected sleepily, was that they were appallingly frustrating creatures to read.

 

ii.

Evy was staring glumly at her notes when an insistent knock sounded at her door.

"Evelyn!" a familiar voice hissed, and Evy's heart skipped in her chest. "Evelyn, open up!"

Well, it was ridiculous to think she'd be able to reconstruct months of lost research in one night, anyway. Not to mention the enormity of cataloging the Hamunaptra artefacts, a task severely hampered by a lack of appropriate reference material. Evy welcomed the interruption.

She pulled her robe tight and opened the door. 

"Oh good, you're still up," Rick said, shouldering his way into her room. "We gotta move."

"Move?" Evy repeated.

"Where's your trunk?" he said. He started picking up armfuls of her personal effects and carrying them over to the bed, where he dumped them in an unceremonious pile. Rick really did have an appalling lack of boundaries when it came to a lady's personal belongings. Evy was determined to speak to him about it. After she got to the bottom of this, of course.

"If you think I'm moving one foot from this room before you tell me what's happened --" she began.

"What's _happened_ is that your idiot of a brother just told the entire hotel bar all about the piles of gold he discovered! Oh, and that his sister, the antiquities expert --"

"Librarian."

"-- is authenticating the whole thing in her room as we speak." Rick's expression was rather ferocious. 

"Oh, dear." Evy frowned. "We never should have left him alone down there."

"You're tellin' me," Rick said. "We should've left him in the desert."

The last comment was so blatantly composed of bluster, Evy didn't even bother to roll her eyes. "Let's be reasonable about this. Surely there's no need to move hotel rooms --"

"Rooms? I plan on moving _hotels_."

Evy sputtered. "It's the middle of the night!"

Rick paused to give her a significant look. "After all we've been through, you're worried about a little game of late-night shuffle?"

At that moment, Evy heard heavy footsteps in the hall. They paused just outside her door.

Rick cocked an eyebrow at her. 

"Fine," she hissed. "You find Jonathan. I'll pack up the artefacts."

Jonathan, as it turned out, wasn't in a fit state to go far, so Rick employed his somewhat dubious but undeniably effective skills to open the locked door of an unoccupied room on the hotel's ground floor. There was only one bed, which Evy accepted with some reluctance. Jonathan slumped noisily on top of several cushions near the far wall and Rick grimly took up position in the chair facing the door.

Evy did not get much sleep that night.

 

iii.

The artefacts were clearly too dangerous to be in their possession indefinitely, and Evy woke the next morning determined to take them to the proper authorities at the Cairo Museum of Antiquities. She wasn't sure who the current curator was, or even if one had been appointed yet, and she knew the museum would be in a period of upheaval considering what it had been exposed to only days before. But she knew there was no better place for the artefacts than a hallowed institution of knowledge and research.

"If you say so," Rick said doubtfully when Evy explained it to him. Jonathan was still asleep in the corner. 

"Did you have," Evy started. "What I mean is, had you put any thought towards what you might do if you had that sort of money?" 

She glanced down at the bulging saddlebags on the floor, and Rick raised an eyebrow. "I suppose I'd start with a good meal and a stiff drink and work up from there," he said.

"Oh," she said, feeling unaccountably disappointed. "But don't you have some, some ambitions?"

"Oh, sure," Rick said. "They don't necessarily depend on being rich, though."

"Adventure," she guessed recklessly. She flushed in embarrassment, but Rick just grinned at her.

"Yeah," he said. "And, you know. Family. Trust. That kind of thing." His eyes slid away from hers. "Love."

"Oh," Evy whispered. 

"I better find us some breakfast," Rick added quickly, before she could ask if he had those things waiting for him back in America. "Wake up sleeping beauty over there, would you?"

When Rick returned with some breakfast that he'd charmed out of the hotel kitchen, Jonathan was mostly upright and mostly dressed. He'd agreed to bring the artefacts to the museum, but only so that he could find out how much they were worth.

"They're priceless!" Evy insisted, frowning at him. "The ancient knowledge these items possess has no monetary value."

"Yes, yes," Jonathan agreed, "but the question is how much will someone pay for that priceless knowledge?"

"The man has a point," Rick said, and he shrugged easily when Evy turned her glare on him.

The museum was in more disarray than Evy had imagined. The sight of the familiar building so destroyed made her stomach twist in dismay.

Her thoughts must have been evident on her face, because Rick took her hand and squeezed gently. It was a warm and grounding touch, and Evy squeezed back in thanks. There were several people scattered throughout the foyer; some were engaged in clearing away the debris, while others appeared to be discussing the safe evacuation of an Eighteenth Dynasty sarcophagus that was half-buried in rubble. Evy didn't recognize anyone in view, and she felt a pang in her heart at the realization. She cleared her throat and said loudly, "Excuse me, please! We are in urgent need of an antiquities expert. Has a new curator been appointed yet?"   

One of the men standing near the sarcophagus turned to look at them. "Whatcha need to speak to a curator for?" he asked, and Evy blinked in surprise at his American accent.

He started towards them, and two other men followed more slowly. As the first man got closer, Evy realized with some trepidation that there was a gun on his hip and his smile had turned a little mean. All of a sudden he looked less like the sort of person who helped restore a museum after a visitation from a mummy, and more like the sort of person who might see such a museum as vulnerable.

"See that, Jack?" one of the others called, and Evy realized with a sinking feeling that he was nodding towards Jonathan and the bulging saddlebag clutched to his chest.

Before Evy could say a word, Rick was physically pushing them out the main door and into the bright sunlight. "I can't take either of you anywhere," he muttered, once they were a safe distance away.

Jonathan rolled his eyes. "Americans!" he huffed. "No offence," he added to Rick, who rolled his eyes back.

It had all happened so quickly that Evy didn't have the chance to look at any of tomes in the museum's library, and she really had been counting on that to move forward with her research. She gave Rick a pointed look. Surely they could have made time for a brief detour. Men of that sort were interested in flashy things like sarcophagi, not the wealth to be found in a library. "And it wasn't as though we were actually running for our lives," she pointed out. "This time, I mean."

"Says you," Rick shot back. "Lady, I've been running for my life since I met you."

"Cheer up, old mum," Jonathan said consolingly. "There are other libraries in the world."

 

iv.

According to Rick, now that they had at least two different groups of treasure-seekers after them, it was safer if they checked into a new hotel under assumed names. Evy thought the charade was a little ridiculous and refused to dignify the idea with a response after Rick had designated her 'Ethel' of all things. The only saving grace of the matter was that Jonathan had been dubbed 'Jehoshaphat.'

At first, Evy passed the time working as much as she could on cataloguing the artefacts and reconstructing her own notes. It was difficult without resources, of course, but Evy had always believed a librarian's greatest tool was her own mind, and she was determined to make the most of it. 

Nevertheless, when Jonathan started cajoling her to play cards with him, she decided to allow the distraction, though she had to scold him for suggesting they gamble with the gold coins from Hamunaptra. Later, once Jonathan had slumped into sleep in the armchair, she looked at Rick, who was cleaning his gun near the window, and was startled by the abrupt thought of how like a new book Rick was to her, with so many pages still unread. It was a whimsical sort of metaphor, but rather apt for a librarian, and it sent Evy over to the window to sit next to him and offer to trade tales. As the afternoon light faded over the bustling city, Rick told her about the small town he grew up in; the dog who followed him home when he was ten years old and who didn't leave his side for the next eight years; the five months he spent bootlegging whiskey during the American Prohibition; and the men he served with in the French Foreign Legion. In turn, she told him what she remembered of her mother, how much she'd longed to stay in Egypt after her mother's death and how much she'd hated the boarding school in England. She told him about how close she and Jonathan became once their father died, too, and how Egypt had drawn both of them back like a magnet. 

Once they'd tired of talking, Rick taught her how to do that trick with a pin and a locked door, his deft fingers gently guiding hers through the unfamiliar movements. She felt full of warmth and wonder, even a tiny bit wicked, and she couldn't imagine being anywhere else in the world. 

Naturally, on the third day, Jonathan accidentally cursed himself by twisting the lid off a small jewel-encrusted jar that was clearly labelled "Do Not Open." Well, it was clearly labelled as such if you were fluent in Hieratic, but of course Jonathan wasn't. 

The curse manifested itself, to Rick's great amusement, as a small but persistent raincloud that hovered just above Jonathan's head.

"Feeling a bit under the weather?" Rick said innocently, and Jonathan sent him a baleful look. 

"It may actually be a blessing rather than a curse," Evy said, stifling her giggles. "Rain was very important to the ancient Egyptians, you know."

"Oh, yes, I feel very blessed right now," Jonathan muttered. A drop of rain landed right on the tip of his nose.

"Don't be such a wet blanket," Rick said, grinning.

Evy eventually had to send Jonathan out of the room on account of excessive dampness, and she ordered Rick after him to make sure he didn't end up gambling away the artefacts by attempting to predict local weather patterns or some other foolishness.

Unfortunately, by the time Evy had finished decoding the riddle inscribed around the rim of the jar, Jonathan's predicament had drawn the wrong sort of attention and they had to once again leave their hotel in something of a hurry.

"I tried my best to rein him in," Rick protested, and Jonathan swore at him so loudly and inventively that Evy felt the tips of her ears burn.

She reversed the curse that night in a small deserted courtyard close to their third hotel, using a strand of Jonathan's hair, three drops of water from the Nile, and the words inscribed on the jewel-encrusted jar, while Rick stood guard and Jonathan shivered in his soaked clothing.

It was surprising how quickly this sort of thing was becoming normal.

 

v.

Nonetheless, there came a point where it was unconscionable for a librarian to be without her references, lest she confuse 'hawk' for 'handsaw' during her translations. However, Rick was very stubborn about not going out in public, and he became positively mulish whenever Evy proposed a perfectly reasonable plan to visit one of Cairo's libraries. She'd made her plans very stealthy on purpose, but Rick had remained unconvinced. 

Not that Cairo's libraries, barring the one in the Cairo Museum of Antiquities, which she was in no hurry to revisit, were likely to illuminate the matter. In fact, Evy only knew of one location in the city that might prove suitable: the infamous private library of the Fayed family, which was rumoured to contain volumes that the museum could only dream about.

It was clear where Evy needed to visit.

So, two nights after banishing Jonathan's rain cloud, Evy made him distract Rick for a few hours by losing to him at cards. Well, Jonathan claimed he was pretending to lose, but either way, he kept Rick occupied for long enough that Evy was able to sneak out and make her way across the city to the Fayed mansion. She just needed to gain access for long enough to look up one or two minor things which had been hindering the progression of her research. Then she could sneak back to the hotel before Rick even noticed she was gone.

In retrospect, Evy had to admit that she lost track of time. How a librarian was expected to limit herself to only reading one or two things when faced with all the untold treasures of entirely unfamiliar bookshelves, Evy couldn't venture a guess.

As it happened, Rick ended up storming into the mansion like a bull in a china shop, waving a gun and waking the entire household, and found himself locked in a closet for his trouble while a boy from the kitchens ran for the police. Evy managed to pick the lock on the closet door while Jonathan made a distracting fool of himself by the front gate; she was really quite pleased with the speed of her new-found skills in such a demanding and time-sensitive situation.

Once they were back in Evy's hotel room, Rick made such a fuss about the whole thing that a person might have suspected he'd never seen the inside of a linen closet before. Still, they seemed to have escaped detection on their return journey, which meant their hotel room was still safe, and Evy settled down to sleep that night feeling very content.

\+ i.

It was all worth it, in the end, for the slim volume Evy found in the Fayed library, which she had, with only a small measure of guilt, slipped into her pocket. The book's information was a little obscure, but Evy was certain that it was connected to the strange markings she'd been attempting to decipher on one of the stranger of the Hamunaptra artefacts. If she was correct, the combination of the book and the artefact could lead them to the hidden entrance of the Hall of Records, the famous library rumoured to be buried beneath the Great Sphinx of Giza and undisturbed for thousands of years.

"Another library?" Rick said doubtfully.

"Oh, no," Evy said, and her heart and her head were both so full she could barely contain herself. " _The_ library. The greatest library in the ancient world! It is said that the Hall of Records contains the knowledge of all of Egyptian civilization."

"Well, come on, then, old mum," Jonathan said. "I suppose you won't rest until we go and see if we can dig it up. There's no chance of any more of those solid gold books there, is there?"

Evy threw her arms around her darling, ridiculous brother. "They do say the history of Atlantis can be found within the scrolls of the Hall of Records. The continent of Atlantis is just a myth, of course, but --"

Jonathan's eyes widened. "Never say 'just a myth,' that's my motto," he said, with the straight face of someone who had never said such a thing before in his life. "Well, what are we waiting for?"

Evy turned to Rick. Brave, generous, wonderful Rick, who had never even broached the idea of taking his third of the Hamunaptra treasure and abandoning them. 

"It isn't that far to Giza," Evy said in a hopeful tone of voice, "and you said yourself we should get out of Cairo."

"Yes, out of Cairo, absolutely a good plan," Rick said. Then he added, more slowly, "You think we should stick together? Only I thought -- you might be going back to England. After."

"Oh, no," Evy said, surprised. "Egypt's in my blood, after all. There are so many things left to see! And besides, you're here."

A slow smile broke out across Rick's face. "I have to ask," he said. "Is all of this a regular thing with you two? I just wanna know what I'm letting myself in for."

"This?" Jonathan repeated indignantly.

Evy felt her cheeks heat a little. Then she thought, with a sense of serenity, that there was little point in prevarication. After all, she had not forgotten the heated kisses she and Rick had exchanged in the desert. And though they hadn't yet had the opportunity to revisit those embraces, what with Jonathan's constant presence, Evy had caught Rick looking at her in a certain way that made her think -- well. She did not have much in the way of practical experience, but she was a librarian after all and she had read Catallus' unexpurgated poems in the original Latin.

"I think you know by now exactly what you're letting yourself in for," she said to Rick. "And you should know that we're accepting applications for a permanent companion."

"Applications?" Rick said.

"Companion?" Jonathan said.

"Well, I'm accepting applications," Evy clarified. "Jonathan doesn't actually have a say in the matter. I have to admit it would help your case if you acquired his recommendation, but I will consider you without it."

"What?" Jonathan said.

Rick was smiling at her, and he reached out to take her hand, his thumb rubbing tiny, gentle circles into her skin. "Tell me the truth, " he said. "You think I have a shot at being accepted?"

Evy raised her eyebrow at him. "Oh, no, you're not getting an answer that easily. I can be stubborn, can't I, Jonathan?"

"Oh, for the love of --" Jonathan said. "Must you entangle me in your ridiculous courtship?"

"Don't rain on our parade, Jonathan," Rick said, without tearing his eyes away from Evy. She felt warm under the strength of his gaze, and there was a fluttery sensation in her belly. She'd never felt anything like this before, something so exciting and terrifying at the same time, something as wide and ancient and endless as the desert, and she was loving every single, shivery moment of it. 

"I'm going to find a drink," Jonathan said darkly.

"Companion isn't really the right word," Evy admitted, after Rick leaned over to kiss her, his fingertips lingering on her cheek and brushing lightly down her throat.

"Husband?" he suggested, grinning wickedly. 

Evy felt herself flush, but she smiled back. "Well, you never know what you might pick up on an adventure," she said softly, and she curled her fingers into his thick hair to tug his mouth back down to hers.

 

♥


End file.
